


If We Stopped Breathing

by inviscrips



Category: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - Stoppard
Genre: Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-07
Updated: 2015-05-07
Packaged: 2018-03-29 11:04:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3894022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inviscrips/pseuds/inviscrips
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I think we’ve vanished,” you say, honestly.</p><p>“We’re still here,” his disembodied voice tells you. He is trying to be comforting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If We Stopped Breathing

You are awake.

You are lying on a hard wooden bed in the bottom of a boat with your hands resting on your chest, laced one in the other, like you are an ancient king at rest in his sepulcher. But you are not dead yet. Beneath your fingers, you can feel your heart beating, steadily, and you can feel your chest rise and fall.

You can hear the waves lapping against the side of the boat. You can feel the soft rocking motion of the sea. You are trying to feel comforted by this movement, but with every lurch of the boat, the room you are in seems to grow less real, and the dread inside your heart swells.

It doesn't help that you can’t see anything. You think that the room you are in is dark. It is also possible that you've gone blind, or that you've forgotten how to tell whether your eyes are open or closed. Whatever the cause, the darkness is disorientating. The gentle swaying of the boat in this darkness makes you feel as if you are spinning in a void, like you are disappearing. If you did not feel your heart beating under your fingertips, there would be nothing left to prove anything exists.

“Are you there?” you call into the darkness, softly. There had been someone with you in the room, but you have realized that you cannot hear anyone’s breath but your own.

“What do you want?” The answer comes immediately. There is a slight irritation in his voice, like you’ve woken him up, but the answer has come too quickly for that to be the case.

“Is that you?” you ask. It’s his voice, as familiar as your own, but you need more than that. It was easier a little earlier, when the candle was lit and you could see him across the room, lying in a cramped bed like yours. But now you have only sounds to go on, and you can't even hear him unless he talks.

“Who else would it be?” he asks.

You hesitate, wanting reassurance: “are you positive?”

“We’re not playing-” he says sharply, and you say “I’m not trying to-”, quickly, and then you both go quiet.

“It’s me,” he says, after a moment, relenting.

“How can you be sure?”

“I’ve never doubted it.”

“Not once?”

“Why would I?”

“Because - how can you tell?”

“You just _can_.” He’s put on his faux-patient voice that’s really more exaggerated impatience than anything. It’s familiar, comforting. You wait for him to continue. “It’s the one thing about which we can be certain - that we’re _us_. Even if we don’t know who we _are_ , at the very least, I can be certain that I’m me, and you can be certain that you’re you. I know I _have_ been me. I can’t remember ever _stopping_ being me. I’m certainly not anyone else.” He pauses. “Are you sure that you’re you?”

You consider it. “I _think_ I am.”

“You _think_?”

You shift, and then you are staring at the void where his voice comes from.

“I think we’ve vanished,” you say, honestly.

“We’re still here,” his disembodied voice tells you. He is trying to be comforting, now.

“But - how can you be sure?” Your voice comes out hushed and panicked. “Can’t you feel how we're - slipping? We’re barely clinging to the edge of being. We could fall off at any moment...  we're disappearing. We’ve been slowly fading all this time… we’re nothing but voices now. As far as anyone else is concerned, we could be - the work of a single skilled performer, throwing his voice, and even that - ” you take a breath and start again, slower and quieter. “I can’t see a thing. I’m not sure there’s anything left to see. I’m taking it on good faith that _you’re_ there at all. When you stop speaking, you vanish.”

He is silent for so long that you’re sure he really has blinked out of existence. But then you hear a rustling in the void, and soft steps, and you feel someone sit down on the bed beside you.

“See? I’m here.”

You sit up. You strain your eyes, but in the perfect black you can't make him out even inches away. But you can feel his breath on your cheek, just barely. It trembles, and when you move it stops.

You reach out your hand and your fingers find the cold metal of a hoop, the prickle of stubble, the angle of a jawbone under warm skin.

“It's me.”

“It’s _someone_."

“It’s _me_.”

You feel sheepish. “It’s safer not to assume.”

“It’s _me_. Ask me something only I would know.”

But you can’t think of a question.

“What are we going to do?” you moan to the darkness around you.

You feel his hand on the back of yours, guiding it away from his face. When you wrap your fingers around his, you can feel yourself feeling him. Proof of existence.

“Do you still think I know?”

His voice sounds small, like he’s not sure he even wants you to hear it. You’re not sure if you’re supposed to have heard it, so you stay quiet, and eventually, he continues.

“I thought a boat would lead us to _answers_. Or at least away from the same questions.” He hesitates. He's letting his thumb rub circles on the back of your hand, and you think he wouldn't be saying any of this if you weren’t half-vanished, if there were still more to you than a voice and a hand holding his. "But I don’t like the way we’re – contained. We’ve been set in motion and pushed in an arbitrary direction… doomed to drift idly away from the action - and when we finally come to a stop where will we be? Nowhere - on a boat...”

You know you should do something, but you aren’t sure what. You and he are the only thing you know in all of this, and this isn’t how the two of you work. It’s never been him whispering fearfully in the darkness, and you’re not the one who puts your arm around him and tells him things will be all right. You can’t find the right words to tell him that the only really important thing is that the two of you are nowhere _together_.

You shift and lean against him, sitting side by side. You hold his hand in yours. He is warm and still alive, real and solid in the dark.

“Well,” you say, “well. Well - I’m rather fond of boats, myself.”

He gives a choked and bitter laugh that doesn’t leave his throat.

“I mean - we’re not _restricted_ ,” you continue, desperately. “We’re free to rely on - spontaneity and whim - we can do what we want - whatever we feel like - without consequence. It’s like a kind of freedom. Don’t you see it?”

Even in the dark, you can tell he’s looking over at you.

“I can’t see anything,” he says, gently wry.

“Well - look,” you say, and because you can’t think of anything else to do, you move your head a few inches and close the distance between him and you. In the darkness, you misjudge the position of his head and end up pressing a blind kiss to the corner of his mouth. You feel his entire body tense against you, and feel his soft huff of surprise against your cheek.

“It’s like that,” you say, suddenly self-conscious, “sort of, except - to the left,” and you kiss him again, to the left.

And for a moment, he kisses you back. He kisses gently, like he’s trying to reassure you, and desperately, like he needs your reassurance. He presses himself against you, cups your chin in his hand, guiding you to the angle he’s decided is best, and you have to steady yourself to keep both of you from falling backward on the bed. You think, for the first time, that maybe this darkness is good. Maybe it’s nice to disappear a little. The distinction between him and you feels momentarily blurred: if he can hold your hand and tell you that he’s worried and kiss you like this, you suddenly believe that you can be the one who comforts him, who tells him you’ll keep him safe in a way that he’ll accept.

You move back, just a little.

“Rosencrantz-” you start, and suddenly he freezes. For a moment you feel him staring at you, trying to see you in the dark, and then he roughly turns away, and you’re sitting shoulder to shoulder again, barely touching. His disappointment is palpable; it crushes you; you feel like you’ve been given a glimpse of the meaning of life only for it to be taken away.

You don't understand it.

“Was that - should we not have…?” you venture timidly.

He doesn’t say anything.

“It seemed like the thing to do.” You’re desperately apologetic. “In the moment.”

His silence is stifling.

“You _liked_ it,” you whine.

That does it. “It doesn’t _matter_ if I liked it,” he spits out, turning on you, flustered and disbelieving and upset. “That’s not _it_.”

You shrink back involuntarily, and maybe it gives him pause, because when he continues he sounds like a little more like he’s trying to explain instead of attack. “It's not the right _time_ , do you understand? These things have - an order. You can’t just decide when they happen.” His words start to tumble out over each other, desperate for you to understand. “There’s a pattern at work - rules to follow - resolutions to be had, a narrative to fulfill - two people overcoming all odds to come together at last...  separation and re-unification, a case of mistaken identity, perhaps... you have to understand that these things can't just - happen - in the middle of the night, when it's dark, just because we’re worried - there should be a moment, at the end, where the music swells and the sun is setting and we know exactly who we are - a moment set aside for – a hearty embrace, at the least, or… kisses, if we want them.”

There’s a beat of silence. You know he’s waiting for you to say you understand.

“At the end,” you echo slowly.

“When the moment is right,” he confirms.

“It's not the right time,” you repeat, as if you are beginning to catch on.

“You’ve got it.” He sounds relieved.

You think about this, sitting next to him on the narrow bed, your shoulders touching in the dark. It feels like the right time to you.

“How will we be able to tell?”

“Hm?”

“How will we be able to tell when the time is right?”

“Well - when everything else is resolved, all unseen forces uncovered and conquered, the inner workings of the plot laid out for all to understand - you’ll see. It’ll be the only thing left to do.”

“Oh.” You think about this, too. “We could take care of it early,” you suggest, hopefully.

“What would be the sense in that?”

“It would be.... proactive.”

“Proactive?”

“ _Responsible._ No sense putting it off. It would hang over us.”

He sighs. “You haven’t got it.”

“We’d get it over with.”

“That’s not how it’s done.”

“It’s how we could do it.”

“It’s not what’s _expected_.”

"Would anyone care?” You say it quietly, without much hope. “They can’t see us. You said it yourself. We’re out of the action. We don’t matter to them. They wouldn’t even have to know."

"It’s not about _them_ ,” he says, exasperated with you again. “It’s about _us_ knowing who we _are_. Knowing our own _names._ Knowing why we're  _here._ If we don’t know that - how can it mean anything? How can we expect to know what _we_ are?”

You’re not sure you agree with his reasoning, but you don’t how to explain how you think that you don't have to know who someone is, exactly, to know who they are to _you_.

You sit there a while, the two of you, side by side.

“You said there’d be music?” you ask finally.

“I was speaking figuratively.”

“Oh.”

“But - there could be. If you want music.”

He’s dropped his hand on top of yours. You move closer to him.

“And we’ll have a sunset?”

“And we’ll _know our own names_.”

You listen to the longing in his voice and decide that, even if sitting hand in hand in the uncertain dark of a ship seems like the perfect time to you, you can wait for his music and sunsets.

“Well - alright,” you concede hesitantly, and feel his shoulders relax. “Maybe it's not time for that. Is it time for anything _now_?”

“It's the middle of the night."

“Unless we've gone north."

"It's _dark_. It's time for _bed._ "

But he doesn’t move to stand, or take his hand away from yours.

“Separate ones, I expect?"

He’s quiet. “Traditionally.”

His fractional hesitation is enough to give you hope. “There’s room in mine,” you point out.

“Very little.”

“So are you.”

He ignores this. “It’s - unorthodox.”

“It’s _dark_ ,” you insist. “If you leave, we might lose each other.” You don't want him to move back to his own bed. You like being close enough to feel him. It’s the only thing since he blew out the candle that has made you feel completely certain that you're real.

“I could stay,” he says after a long moment, like he’s making a concession, although he’s agreed too quickly for you to believe it. “For a bit. While it’s dark.”

So the two of you lie down, arranging yourselves to fit in the bed that’s undeniably too small for one of you, let alone both. He mumbles “ _plenty of room_ ,” into your chest, with a surliness you think is just for show, and you smile down into his hair and say, “what did I tell you?” and wrap your arm around him.

At first he's on edge. You can tell by the way his shoulders stay tight under your touch, by how he stays unnaturally still, by the feel of his heart pounding two beats for your one. But the two of you lie there in the dark, not speaking, and he slowly thaws, relaxing against you so gradually you barely notice it happening. He lies very still, fingering the feathery ends of your hair like he’s been wondering what it feels like, and you keep your arm wrapped around him. As closely as you’re pressed together, your bed feels more comfortable like this than when you were alone. 

It is still dark. You can hear the waves lapping against the side of the boat, and Guildenstern’s soft breathing as he drifts off to sleep. You can feel his heart beating close to your own, and you can feel his chest rise and fall. You and he are the only two things in the world that you are certain still exist.

“Guildenstern?”

He shifts against your chest, half-asleep. “Mmm?”

"There will be a moment... at the end...?”

"Yes," he says dreamily. "Yes, I think so. At the end, when the time is right. Yes, it’ll come."

Of course, it never does.

 

 


End file.
